I got curious and downloaded the SDK and after playing a bit with the Your First Mini App tutorial, I realized the whole thing is so close to building for the actual web, it both fascinates, intrigues, and honestly somewhat infuriates me.

Overall a really nice separation of concerns. I could very well imagine being productive with this in no time. The onboarding experience of the documentation is pretty neat. The SDK is well made with (essentially an adapted) Chrome DevTools integrated and some VS Code like features like code completion.

From what I understand, it's all running in an iframe, Chrome/WeChat DevTools then hides the container, and all you see is the WXML layer. When you look at the SDK's package contents, they make no real effort at hiding any of the inner mechanics: it's all HTML (of particular interest: /Applications/wechatwebdevtools.app/Contents/Resources/package.nw/html/standalone.html), CSS (of particular interest: /Applications/wechatwebdevtools.app/Contents/Resources/package.nw/static/app.css), and JavaScript (of particular interest: /Applications/wechatwebdevtools.app/Contents/Resources/package.nw/js/vendor/index.js).

Finally there is a local web server running that allows them to link from the online docs to local URLs like 127.0.0.1:32123/minicode/VBZ3Jim26zYu, which in turn allows them to open code samples from the docs that are ready to play with a click in WeChat DevTools. The web server luckily only runs when the WeChat DevTools are open.